Last September or so, I exulted that I'd finally found how to fix the server lag problems BZP has been plagued with. Over the last few weeks, regular visitors will have noticed many times when the server wasn't available, or was very very slow. I've been spending quite a few hours on trying to get it fixed, and it seems to have stabilized.

Web logs showed last Monday we had a lot of traffic, I'm not sure exactly why. But it was hanging the web server. I did everything I could to keep it going, but it still ended up being offline for several hours. I tried every optimization I could, and cleaned up the drive, and so on, but at the time nothing helped. Finally, on Tuesday, everything started settling down and it looks like we're doing OK now. (Of course, now that I write this, I'm positive the server will hang just to prove me wrong.)

So I think we had some sort of visitation spike on Monday, and the optimizations I did actually worked in the long run. I wrote down everything I did, so I should be able to reproduce it if and when the server slows down again. (I optimize the database about once a month, sometimes more often.)

It wasn't a fun feeling, thinking that once again I would have to babysit the server to keep it running. I don't have that kind of time. But at least we seem to be doing OK again. The same can't be said for LEGOFan.org, another site I run, which has been offline for two weeks with dead disk drives. Time will tell if all the content was lost from that machine. The good news for BZP, though, is I have everything downloaded off the server, in case this box goes Tango Uniform (toes up). But since it's Linux, and not (yuk) Windows like LEGOFan, I have more confidence.